The influx of workers back into cities has a huge impact on both the urban economy and the expansion of COVID. In this article for mint, Anup Malani and Vaidehi Tandel, researchers, Artha Global argue that there is a need for measures to discourage labourers from returning to cities, citing increasing infection spreads. Barring returning workers will help in managing health capacities and limiting the spread of the epidemic in cities.

Excerpts below:

“What, then, is to be done? While it might be tempting to quarantine returning non-infected workers, such a policy does not seem tenable since there are many more non-infected now, and special facilities for quarantining are unlikely to be large enough. Quarantining returnees at home, often in slums, is not much of a quarantine, given how dense slums are. Moreover, it would be a dramatic shift from the prior policy of quarantining the infected.

An alternative is to offer subsidies to keep workers in their home states. The problem is that the cost of this would be quite high. It is hard for states to tell which workers want to return to cities. Hence, state governments may end up offering subsidies to all workers who returned home. States may not have the fiscal capacity to afford such subsidies. The Centre should consider subsidizing this effort by expanding programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme to cover more than 100 days of work and offering higher wages.”

Read the full article here.